East Baltimore Muse

Meditations on Michael S. Harper’s Use Trouble Use Trouble by Michael S. Harper University of Illinois Press, 2009 Afaa Michael Weaver November 14, 2009 Michael S. Harper’s most recent collection of poetry is Use Trouble , a glance over many years, a peering into the spaces between chance and opposition, between no way out and the promise of change. When he told me about his new book about it in an email exchange, I ordered it immediately. I was in Taiwan and had it shipped to my office in Boston. Later I settled back into my apartment here in Somerville and sat at my kitchen table holding it in my hands the way I do when a friend puts a gift into the world this way, a new book. I mark the time that I have known Harper as beginning in the fall semester of 1986, when I sat in his Volvo with him and his daughter Rachel as he lectured me on the need to know metrics, as meter is to poetry what the notation of sound is to music. He later told me that I would find...

O Black and Unknown Bards, How Do We Love Thee? Let Us Count the Ways... “I am writing by the pound...” Langston Hughes to Arna Bontemps September 27, 1952 -- Afaa Michael Weaver “I am writing by the pound,” Hughes wrote to his longtime friend Arna Bontemps. Hughes was in his 50th year of life, with fifteen more active years before his death, and I was not quite one year old. Now at 57, I sense a need to once again take a cue from the old master and be busier at my work. In that same letter Hughes told Bontemps he had shipped some twenty pounds of manuscripts, including all five drafts of his play Simply Heavenly , to Yale University, the repository for his papers. It was the seriousness with which he took himself as a writer that has so inspired me in my life. It was a seriousness that George Houston Bass, my late mentor, worked to instill more solidly in me. Bass had been one of Hughes’ secretaries, and Hughes named him the executor of his litera...

Procter & Gamble's Baltimore Plant (now a day care center for Yuppies) When Poets Grow in Factories Afaa Michael Weaver 蔚雅風 August 11, 2009 My first experience in a creative writing class was as a visitor. Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew, allowed me to sit in on his class. It was 1980, and he introduced me to a number of poets, including Frank O’Hara. I complained to Rodger that I felt alienated from poetry as a factory worker. “Nonsense, Michael. Your poetry is all around you.” I thought he was just being flippant. “I don’t know about that, Rodger. Trucks and machines don’t seem very poetic to me.” But I took his advice and began writing about that world around me. An earlier manuscript became my first book, Water Song , with poems like “Currents” and “The Aftermath,” a poem which Gwen Brooks told me was a favorite of hers. Immediacy was the lesson, and I learned it from Rodger Kamenetz. He was teaching the creative writing class at Baltimore Com...

Rutgers University Afaa Michael Weaver Camden Campus 蔚雅風 1990-1998 The Angel of Adjunct Awareness It was in autumn, in the year nineteen eighty-seven, a few months after I walked across the stage and away from graduate school life, away from the pious heaven of access to some of academe’s best libraries, the heady and inspiring culture of what was, at that time, the most popular undergraduate culture in the country and one of the most popular and competitive writing programs. I didn’t think much about what life would be like outside the campus green, despite the fifteen years of factory work. It was a grand performance in willful forgetting, I suppose, as I even tried to finagle a way to stay at Brown University in the way of a doctorate program, but I waited too late for such a thing and so was cast out onto the outer planets away from the center of the universe. I sat at a lunch table at Essex County Community College in Newark, N.J., munching a homemade t...

"Hey Light Bulb!  Where you get that haircut?" Adjunct Chronicles               Afaa Michael Weaver 2014 Kingsley Tufts Award The Government of Nature www.afaaweaver.net www.plumflowertrilogy.org The life of the poet and budding playwright in graduate school was more of a paradise than I realized at the time. I could write a play in a weekend and have it produced the following weekend.   Brown University has several theaters, and my favorite, of course, was the black box where we had our student showcase.   Lynn Nottage was a classmate of mine in those years, from 1985 to 1987, as well as Teresa Church and C.B. Coleman. We were having the time of our lives and didn’t know it.    I had the blessing of being under the tutelage of the late George H. Bass and Paula Vogel in playwriting and, although briefly, Keith Waldrop and Michael S. Harper in poetry.   In the Rockefeller library I had a car...

  Arizona             Tempe is a landscape as far away from Somerville, Massachusetts, as Saturn is from Mars, the spacious desert vs. the rocky hills and ocean, the cacti that take centuries to grow vs. the layers of fall New England foliage.   Each arm of the cactus is some major accomplishment that goes unnoticed by most eyes.   Then there are the stunning moments, such as when a desert owl drops into a downward glide from the inner portion of the top of a tree, one moment an unseen hooting in the evening, and then the noiseless swish of some of the most perfectly placed feathers in the world of the birds, a favorite world of mine.               Meeting Norman Dubie was as much a mecca for me as seeing Twin Buttes, a pair of hills that are sacred Indian ground and which sit next to a very old cemetery, both of which are behind the Fiesta hotel, where I spent a week while in Arizona visiting friends and relaxing.   When I met Norman for the first time after knowing of him for...